<p>A married couple were stunned to find that a badger had been breaking into their suburban terraced home to steal food – via their cat flap.<br></p>Greg Dow, 41, captured the startled black and white animal on video after it had crept into his kitchen to munch on cat food while he was watching the TV.<br><br>The hilarious clip shows the nocturnal mammal first charge head first into the back door before finally clambering back out of the flap and into the couple's back garden.<br><br>Greg’s wife Heather, 41, assumed a fox was sneaking into their three-bed home after previously finding bins overturned and cat biscuits scattered across the floor.<br><br>But she said it was “pretty cool” to find out that their visitor was in fact a fluffy-tailed badger, while adding their cat remained unimpressed with his new dinner guest.<br><br>She said: “It was really funny and very special, and I’ve probably never seen a badger in real life, so to see one in our kitchen was pretty cool.<br><br>“It’s obvious cost us in cat food, and the cat’s not very impressed. But we figured out that we’ll put the cat food on the table because badgers cannot climb.<br><br>“We don’t want to encourage it, but we’re not going to discourage it either.”<br><br>Speech and Language therapist Heather, from Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, said the couple had first realized that an animal was breaking into their home at the start of last week.<br><br>She said: “We knew there was something getting in because we’d woken up before to an overturned bin and a box of cat biscuits spread across the kitchen floor. <br><br>“We thought maybe it was a fox, which was using our cat flap. But we didn’t think it could be anything bigger than that.<br><br>Heather said her husband had been watching TV at around 9.30 pm on Tuesday (Sept 27), when their cat alerted him to the presence of another animal in the kitchen.<br><br>She said: “My husband was in the living room, watching TV and I’d gone up to bed. He then heard a noise – a munching – and he figured it was a fox. <br><br>“So he came round the corner to the kitchen, and then the badger came scuttling towards him and out of the cat flap. He thought, ‘What on earth?’”<br><br>Mum of two Heather said she’d later found out that more badgers had been found in homes as the warm summer had left them with few sources of natural food.<br><br>And she said she felt sorry for the black and white creature that had broken into her property, which was clearly struggling to find its next meal.<br><br>She said: “An expert said because it’s been so hot this summer, it’s been really hard for badgers to find food. I feel really sorry for them.